I'm not a developer. Here's how I turned my Lovable web app into real iOS and Android apps and got both submitted in under a day.
I built my app with Lovable and it works great in the browser. Then people started asking if there was an app they could download, and I realized I had no clue how to get it into the App Store or Google Play.
I'm not technical. I can describe what I want and click the right buttons, and that's about where it ends. This is the route I wish someone had shown me before I burned all that time searching.
Everything else I found was too hard for me
Lovable makes web apps. There's no "export to iPhone" button, so you need something else to get into the stores. When I searched, I kept landing on the same few options.
The first was wrapping the site with Capacitor. Every tutorial assumed I had a Mac with Xcode, plus Android Studio, and already knew what signing certificates were. I didn't get far.
Then there are paid services that put your website inside an app shell. That sounded perfect until I read that Apple rejects a lot of these under Guideline 4.2, which basically says your app has to be more than a repackaged website. I didn't want to pay for something and then get rejected.
The last option was hiring a freelancer. Possible, but expensive for a side project, and I'd need them again every time I wanted to change something.
I went back and forth between these for way too long.
Then I asked Claude
At some point I stopped googling and asked Claude something like "what's the easiest way to get a Lovable app into the App Store and Google Play if I can't code?" One of the tools in the answer was CatDoes. I'd never heard of it, but it said it could take an existing project and rebuild it as a real native app instead of wrapping the website. So I gave it a shot.
What I actually did
First I connected my Lovable project to GitHub. It's in Lovable's project settings, and it pushes your code to a repo. If you've already done this, skip it.
Next, in CatDoes I created a new project, chose import from GitHub, picked my repo, and hit import.
Then I mostly waited. The agent read my code and rebuilt it in React Native, which is what makes it an actual iPhone and Android app and not a website in a box. My Lovable app already used Supabase for logins and data, and the mobile version just kept using the same backend. Same database, same user accounts.
About 30 minutes later the native iOS and Android builds were done.
One tip: try the app on your phone with the Expo Go app before you submit anything. The preview in the browser isn't always exactly what you get on a real phone.
Submitting to the App Store
I never opened Xcode. You need an Apple Developer account, which is $99 a year. CatDoes asks for your Apple details and an Expo token, and it walks you through making the token. Then it submits the app to the App Store for you. You can send it to TestFlight first if you want friends to test it.
Submitting to Google Play
Google Play took one manual step. CatDoes builds the Android file (an .aab), I downloaded it, and I uploaded it in the Google Play Console myself. The developer account costs $25 once.
The Play Console has a lot of screens. CatDoes has a step-by-step Google Play guide that I kept open in another tab while I filled them in.
Heads up: if your Google Play developer account is a new personal one, Google makes you run a closed test with 12 testers for 14 days before you can release to everyone. That's Google's rule, not the tool's, but it's worth knowing before you promise anyone a launch date.
All done in under a day
I still can't believe how much time I spent looking for a way to do this. Once I found one, the whole thing took less than a day, from importing the code to having both apps submitted. Apple's review takes its own time after that, but that part is out of your hands anyway.
What it cost
I bought the Plus plan for $100 a month, which comes with 400 credits. Credits get used as the agent works, so keep an eye on them if you ask for a lot of changes.
You might not need Plus. The $50 Starter plan also publishes to both stores. I went with Plus because it has two-way GitHub sync and code export, and I wanted my code to stay in my own repo.
On top of that you pay the stores directly: $99 a year for Apple and $25 once for Google.
Other things worth knowing
It has its own backend built in, with a database, logins, file storage, and server functions. I didn't need it since my app already had Supabase, but if you start a new app from scratch you don't have to set up Supabase or Firebase separately.
GitHub import is how I brought my Lovable code over. You can also paste your site's URL, but if your app has pages behind a login, like a dashboard, GitHub works better because the agent reads the actual code instead of only what's public.
Before you submit, it can check your app against the App Store review rules and point out what would probably get rejected. I'd never submitted an app before, so I liked having that.
It also builds websites and connects custom domains, though I haven't used that part yet.
If you want the longer version, CatDoes has a full guide on converting a Lovable app to a mobile app. It goes deeper on URL vs GitHub import and why wrappers get rejected.
My advice
Don't do what I did and spend days reading Capacitor tutorials you don't understand. Connect GitHub, import the project, and put the time you save into your store screenshots and description.
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